A GOOD business name can be pricey. An entrepreneur looking for the perfect one can hire a naming agency to offer ideas, but that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That may explain why many founders follow the example of the current American president and name their businesses after themselves. A recent article* by […]

EUROPEAN markets have started the day with losses of 1% or so, following a 2% decline in Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index and the 1% loss in the S&P 500 index on Thursday. The Vix, a much used measure of market fear, jumped to 16, its highest level since the presidential election.These are significant moves […]

A head for figuresFOR football clubs, August is often the costliest month, when they make vast bids for each other’s players. This year has been particularly lavish. On August 3rd Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), a French team, signed Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, a Brazilian forward, from Barcelona for €222m ($264m), more than double the previous […]

IN 1959 geologists discovered 2.8trn cubic metres of natural gas—the largest field in Europe—under the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. Cheap gas and free-spending energy firms were thought to be good news for the entire Dutch economy. But higher gas-export prices in the 1970s raised the value of the guilder by a sixth, hitting […]

WHEN the Commonwealth Bank of Australia on August 9th reported its profit for the year to June—above forecasts and just shy of A$10bn ($7.9bn)—it faced questions about cashflows of another sort. Six days earlier the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), a regulator charged with gathering financial intelligence to combat money-laundering and terrorism, had […]

IT IS not a number to tweet about. President Donald Trump plans to plough $1trn of spending into America’s crumbling infrastructure. And a dearth of capital is not a problem: investors are keen on such assets. But investment seems to be falling.Government infrastructure spending in the second quarter fell to 1.4% of GDP, the lowest […]

FINANCIAL markets are supposed to be the font of all wisdom, weighing up the information available and condensing it into a set of prices. Investors are presumed to have an insight into the future—falling bond yields are seen as a sign that the economy is slowing, for example.But are investors that clever when it comes […]

LOOK only at unemployment and inflation, says Peter Conti-Brown, a historian of the Federal Reserve, and Janet Yellen is the Fed’s most successful boss of all time. The second indicator may be below target, but that is a blip compared with the recessions most Fed chairmen have endured. So it is perhaps not surprising that […]

WHERE can you find a 7% interest rate on a sovereign dollar-bond? You would have to take a time-machine to the mid-1990s to find such a yield on a ten-year American Treasury. Alternatively, you could slip back a few days to August 2nd and bid for the $1bn of five-year bonds sold by the government […]

TEN years ago, BNP Paribas, a French bank, temporarily suspended dealings in three funds, citing “the complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the US securitisation market”. Many people treat this as the start of the credit crunch but one can trace it back to the need for Bear Stearns to rescue hedge funds […]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America Corp agreed to pay a combined $65.5 million to settle investor litigation accusing large banks of rigging the roughly $9 trillion government...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Henry "Hank" Paulson, Jr. finished his tenure as the U.S.'s 74th Secretary of the Treasury in January 2009, he put a capstone on his finance career and committed himself to...

Posts belonging to Category Unemployment

That central banks cannot endlessly reduce unemployment without sparking inflation is economic gospel. It follows from “a substantial body of theory, informed by considerable historical evidence”, according to Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve. Her conviction explains why, on June 14th, the Fed raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, to a range of 1-1.25%.

Excluding food and energy, prices are only 1.5% higher than a year ago; the Fed’s inflation target is 2%. But Ms Yellen thinks unemployment is below its so-called “natural” rate, so inflation should soon rise. Is she right? Or has the relationship between unemployment and inflation, dubbed the Phillips curve, gone missing?

Last week, Mr Trump pulled out of the Paris accord, stressing that it puts American workers at an “economic disadvantage” and that it is “unfair” for the US economy.

The “We Are Still In” initiative represents $6.2 trillion of the US economy – composed of bipartisan “drivers of the real economy,” Lou Leonard, World Wildlife Fund’s Senior Vice President of Climate Change and Energy, told The Independent.

32% of UK businesses who use EU suppliers are looking for British replacements

Nearly half (46%) of European businesses expect to reduce their use of UK suppliers

36% of UK businesses plan to respond to Brexit by beating down supplier prices

The UK’s “weak negotiating position” is seen as the biggest hurdle in trade talks

Businesses either side of the English Channel are preparing contingency plans which could sever supply chains between the UK and EU, according to the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS).
A survey of 2,111 supply chain managers found that 32% of UK businesses who work with suppliers on the continent are actively looking for alternative suppliers based in the UK as a response to the referendum.
Businesses within the EU are even more advanced in their preparations. Almost half (45%) of EU businesses who work with UK suppliers are in the process of finding local replacements.

Research has predicted that the proportion of jobs threatened byautomation in India is 69%, while it is 77% in China and 85% in Ethiopia, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has said, citing data from the multilateral agency.

The Trump administration unveiled what it called the biggest tax cuts “in history” on Wednesday, in a move that will simplify the US tax system, slash taxes for businesses large and small – including Trump’s own – eliminate inheritance taxes and set the president on a collision course with Congress over the likely $2tn-plus cost of the proposal. Critics immediately called it “basically a huge tax cut for the rich”.

The plan would cut the US’s individual income tax brackets from seven to three (10%, 25% and 35%) and slash US corporate tax rates from 35% to 15%. “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something really big,” said Gary Cohn, chief economic adviser to Donald Trump. “This is about growing the economy, creating jobs.”

China is expected to report on Monday that its economy grew 6.8 percent in the first quarter, well above Beijing’s full-year target, buoyed by surging government infrastructure spending and a gravity-defying property market that is showing signs of overheating. A strong reading could help wobbly global financial markets but add to worries that China’s government is still relying too heavily on old growth engines like stimulus and not doing enough to tackle risks from an explosive build-up in debt.

Though policymakers have pledged repeatedly to push reforms to head off financial risks and asset bubbles, the government is seeking to keep the world’s second-largest economy on an even keel ahead of a major leadership transition later this year.

US students’ debt burden is soaring, creating a barrier to home ownership and economic mobility as well as a potential drag on consumer spending, a senior Federal Reserve policymaker said on Monday (Apr 3). The phenomenon persists even as the overall picture for US household debt has steadily improved. A decade after the financial crisis, rising incomes and housing prices as well as steady job creation mean more mature borrowers are in better financial shape, said William Dudley, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Dudley is also vice chair of the Federal Reserve committee that sets the central bank’s benchmark interest rates.

According to Morgan McKinley’s London Employment Monitor, the jobs market was under stress in February, with a 23% decrease in jobs available month-on-month. Vacancies were also down 17% year-on-year. With Article 50 set to be triggered in the coming weeks, the recruitment website said that many large companies have found it was “easier to get ahead of the worst case scenario now” and leave London.

“The data suggests that Brexit has had a fundamental depressing effect on City jobs,” said Hakan Enver, operations director at Morgan McKinley’s financial services. “We’ve already witnessed, what was a handful of jobs leaving, become hundreds. How long before we’re looking at losing thousands, even millions?”

The UK and EU are critical economic partners for the United States. In 2015 the U.S. exported $123.5 billion in goods and services to the UK, and imported $111.5 billion worth of British goods and services. The U.S. is Britain’s largest export destination after the EU. U.S.-UK trade is significant. But the real driver of the British-American economy is investment.

In 2015, U.S. foreign direct investment in the UK totaled a record $593.0 billion and UK foreign direct investment in the U.S. totaled $483.8 billion. Estimated sales of American affiliates in the UK and British affiliates in the U.S. totaled more than $1.3 trillion. The UK accounted for 22% of overall global U.S. assets outside the United States. U.S. affiliates employ almost 1.4 million workers in the UK while UK affiliates employ roughly 1.1 million Americans.
British firms were the #1 source of onshored jobs in 25 of the 50 U.S. states in 2014.

America’s capital stock in the UK ($593 billion) is more than double the combined U.S. investment in South America, the Middle East and Africa ($244 billion). Total U.S. investment stock in China was just 13% of the comparable figure in the United Kingdom in 2015.

Sequestered on a brief holiday with her husband Jared Kushner in Vermont, Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's eldest daughter -- one of his senior advisers and the closest member of his family who is Jewish -- has yet to comment on the events of her father's Tuesday afternoon press conference.

Embattled White House chief strategist Steve Bannon declared in an interview published Wednesday that the US is at "economic war with China," promised aggressive trade actions against Beijing and said he is "fighting" other top White House aides "every day."

(Reuters) - Applied Materials Inc , the world's largest supplier of tools used to make semiconductors, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit helped by strong growth in its semiconductor and display businesses.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America Corp agreed to pay a combined $65.5 million to settle investor litigation accusing large banks of rigging the roughly $9 trillion government agency bond market over a decade.

(Reuters) - U.S stocks sold off on Thursday, with the S&P 500 recording its biggest daily percentage drop in three months as escalating worries about the Trump administration's ability to push through its economic agenda rattled investors.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Auto industry groups from Canada, Mexico and the United States are pushing back against the Trump administration's demand for higher U.S. automotive content in a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin was named on Thursday as one of six companies that will share a $499 million contract for research into aerospace systems aimed at developing new technologies and capabilities, the Pentagon said.

(Reuters) - Three U.S. pension funds sued six of the world's largest banks on Thursday, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JP Morgan Chase & Co , accusing them of conspiring to stifle competition in the more than $1 trillion stock lending market.

(Reuters) - The Wisconsin State Assembly on Thursday opened debate on a $3 billion incentive package for a proposed liquid-crystal display plant by Taiwan's Foxconn, a deal that caused a stir when it was announced by President Donald Trump last month.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two lawyers appointed to senior jobs at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have ties to major companies including financial firms Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Wells Fargo & Co that could complicate efforts to regulate them, according to government documents viewed by Reuters.